Seoul, January 20
Ahead of President Lee Myung-Bak’s visit to New Delhi, South Korea today said it is keen to forge cooperation with India in the nuclear energy sector as the two countries plan to upgrade their ties to strategic partnership.

Lee will embark on a four-day visit to India on Sunday, his first overseas travel this year, during which he will hold a summit with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and will be the chief guest at the Republic Day parade.

Lee will seek to expand his country’s relations with India beyond their traditional economic cooperation to a strategic partnership on diplomacy, security and global issues during his trip there next week, his aides said.

“The two sides plan to agree to (establish) a kind of (high-level) strategic dialogue on the political and security fields,” Cheong Wa Dae, a senior official at the presidential office was quoted as saying by Yonhap news agency.

When former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun visited India in 2004, the two countries agreed to pursue a “long-term cooperative partnership for peace and prosperity.”

“This time, we are in consultations with India to enhance the relationship by one notch,” an official said.

Buoyed by a $ 20 billion contract with the United Arab Emirates to build four nuclear reactors there, South Korea is also trying to make inroads into India’s nuclear energy market, the report said.

“First, South Korea needs to have a nuclear energy pact with India,” an official said. “There is no such pact between the two sides. There will be related discussions (during President Lee's trip).”

India’s Ambassador to South Korea, Skand R Tayal also expressed hope for future bilateral cooperation in the nuclear power sector.

“South Korea’s capacity to build and operate nuclear power plants is well-known,” he said.

“There have been preliminary contacts already between Korea Electric Power Corp. and India's Nuclear Power Corp. for possible partnership,” Yonhap quoted Tayal as saying separately.

“India offers profitable opportunities to dynamic Korean companies to make India a base for manufacturing,” he said.

“We are also looking for a strong partnership in the services sector. We hope that Indian IT companies would enter into major collaborative projects with Korean companies, which would be advantageous to both,” the Indian envoy here said.

India and South Korea have significantly bolstered their economic cooperation recently, highlighted by their just-launched free trade deal, called the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA).

Two-way trade totalled $ 15.5 billion in 2008 and the pact, which went into effect from January 1, is expected to boost trade volume by 15 per cent annually on average.

Lee and Singh will also agree to hold a joint committee meeting attended by their Trade Ministers in the later half of this year and lay out a joint vision for expanding mutual trade.

South Korea also needs to increase cooperation with India in diverse areas where they can create synergy by combining the competitive strengths of each nation, Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun said yesterday. — PTI 

Port au Prince, January 20
Two women have been pulled out alive from rubble in Haiti, a full seven days after the devastating earthquake flattened huge swaths of the capital Port-au-Prince. Hotteline Lozama was pulled from the rubble of a Port-au-Prince shopping centre, while Anna Zizi was rescued by Mexican firefighters at about 3:30 p.m. local time.

She was found alive and singing in the rubble of Port-au-Prince’s Roman Catholic cathedral.

Rescue workers wept and hugged each other as Zizi, caked in debris and dust, was placed on a makeshift stretcher, put on a drip, covered with a heat-conserving wrap and driven by truck to a hospital, witnesses said.

“It was an amazing thing to witness, no one could believe she was still alive,” said Sarah Wilson, of British charity Christian Aid.

Washington, January 20
Thirtysix Americans have converted to Islam in prison and have travelled to Yemen for possible terrorist training with Al-Qaida radicals, raising alarm among US officials.

American administration is on “heightened alert because of the potential threat from extremist carrying US passports and the challenge is in detecting and stopping home-grown operatives”, according to a new report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

These new moves of Al-Qaida profiled by the committee come as US has designated Yemen-based Al-Qaida in Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) as a terrorist organisation and slapped sanctions on its leaders. Two top AQAP leaders - Nasir al-Wahishi and Said al-Shihri - too have been designated as terrorists by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the State Department said. The US is also approaching the UN Security Council to slap sanctions on AQAP and its leaders.

Despite some heavy blows, Al-Qaida is not on the run, US law enforcement officials told the committee. They said that Al-Qaida has expanded its recruitment efforts to attract “non-traditional followers and adopt its operation to new environment”.

Several of these new recruits have then “dropped off the radar for weeks at a time” and continue to carry US passports and this radicalisation of the individuals has alarmed the officials.

The report said Al-Qaida’s recruitment pattern has changed from drafting Islamic zealots from amongst Arabs, Afghans and Pakistanis and the group is now seeking to recruit American citizens to carry out terrorist attacks in the US, West and outside.

The document says there is also concern about another group of ten Americans in Yemen who have converted to a fundamentalist form of Islam and married Yemeni women. A top US intelligence official referred to these men as “blond-haired, blue-eyed types” fitting the profile of Americans that Al-Qaida would like to recruit.

In a letter accompanying the report, the committee's chairman Senator John Kerry said, “These groups seek to recruit American citizens to carry out terror attacks in the US.” Al-Qaida forces in Yemen have emerged as a threat to US by the failed Christmas bombing of a US airliner in Detroit and the shooting spree by a Muslim Army Major in Fort Hood Texas base. — PTI

Geneva, January 20
A UN warning that Himalayan glaciers may melt by 2035 appears not to be backed up by scientific evidence, an American scientist says, an admission that could energise climate change critics.

In a 2007 report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the Himalayan glaciers are very likely to disappear within three decades if the present melting rate continues. But a key member of the panel now says the source for that claim is unclear.The statement, made within the group’s voluminous, Nobel-winning report, was little noticed until ‘The Sunday Times’ said the projection seemed to be based on a news report.

“The origin of that material has not been traced through to its source with a high level of confidence,” said Chris Field, a co-chair of an IPCC working group. “Based on the evidence we’ve seen, the estimated data comes from reports that are more like news reports rather than from a primary scientific literature.” The leaders of the panel are investigating how the forecast got into the report, Field told The Associated Press.“There are people in various blog postings and in the media who have pointed out that the text on which that conclusion is based is not a primary scientific source,” Field said. “That appears to be correct as far as we can ascertain.”

Field, director of the ecology department at the Washington-based Carneige Institution for Science, has published numerous articles on climate change. He is also a professor of biology and environmental earth science and an FSI Senior Fellow at Stanford University.

India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh yesterday repeated his previous criticism of the panel’s assessment of the Himalayan glaciers.

“The health of the glaciers is a cause of grave concern, but the IPCC’s alarmist position that they would melt by 2035 was not based on an iota of scientific evidence,” Ramesh was quoted as saying by ‘The Times of India’.

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report of 2007 said the Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than any other place in the world.“The likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate,” it said.

But, in a confusing note, the report added the glacier’s total area “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035.” IPPC chairman Rajendra Pachauri could not be immediately reached for comment today.

The IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US Vice-President Al Gore in 2007 after a series of reports documenting scientific evidence of climate change. — AP